Continuing with our series of Cab, Call Centre Aur Baatein, let me today, present my views on the accent in which we normally speak, and something that forms an integral part of the life in Indian BPOs. Usually, when you meet a person working in a call centre, you would most probably, have a perception of somebody with impeccable English speaking skills, embellished with perfect diction and pronunciation. However, there's a twist in the tale......

Undoubtedly, we, at the call centers, all speak English, decent enough for an average American/Britisher to understand. But I know how I came upto that level - arduous voice-training sessions with a lot of practice and hard work!! Though we Indians speak English in a neutral accent, and we even possess a unique ability to mould our tongue in any manner and and pronounce almost all the words without any difficulty, yet we have to blend our speaking style, just because of the weakness of the westerners, who can't pronounce of lot of words properly. They are weird in the sense, that they don't even have time to complete a sentence and most of the times, (generally, the Americans) they eat the words up. In a nutshell, ‘Americans Ne Angrezi ki Aisee Taisee Fer Rakhi Hai’ .

During my voice-accent training, we were taught how to say ‘Pheeter’ and not ‘Peter’ , ‘Thasty’ and not ‘Tasty’. A lot of batch mates used to whisper amongst themselves, “Yaar ab tak to Peter hi hota tha, ab Pheeeter oh gaya…” One day, a girl who was given an overdose of voice and accent was saying on the call, “ Madam , Do you have thyoo computers…?” and the trainer called her and told her , “ America mein bhi two, two hi hota hai , tyooo nahi ho jata ….”

It is good that now most of the westerners know that they're talking to Indians over the phone coz no matter how much we hard we try to put an accent to our talks, those guyz smell easily as to who we are! But since they have no other option, they talk to us and accept our language speaking skills. However, the funny thing is that still there are a lot of people who would use fake accent and won't even realize that they've transformed their Hindi also, in the American way!! But whatever be the case, Call centre and English are so well-connected now, that anyone who speaks English well is often asked in cities like Delhi, Banglore and Chandigarh, “ Kahin tum Call centre mein to nahi kaam karte….”